Did you consider attending, but couldn’t get onto your government’s delegation and aren’t a Sector Member of the ITU?

Do you have a day job that means you really don’t have time to follow a three-week meeting, but still care how the outcomes might affect Internet governance and the Internet world more generally?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any or all of the above, you may be happy to know I’ll be in Busan from Day 1 of the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014 (Monday 20 October) right through to the very end (Friday 7 November).

An experiment in crowdfunding neutral reporting of a key event in the Internet governance calendar

If you have appreciated my live tweeting and analysis of Internet governance meetings in the past, please consider being part of this initiative. I’m hoping to have funding from as wide a range of stakeholders as possible to ensure that there are no perceptions that my reporting from Busan has been influenced or captured by any single stakeholder group.

So far, organizations have committed USD 13,000 to this project, but I still need a further USD 11,500 to turn the three weeks from a charitable donation by me for the rest of the community into something that allows me to do this professionally. Amounts big or small are gratefully received. And funds do not have to be provided before the Plenipotentiary begins, as I’ll be absorbing the cost differences up-front.

What I’ll be doing at PP14

Tweeting!

For all those people out there who were disappointed that I didn’t tweet IGF 2014 (I was flat out working for the IGF Secretariat working on the Chair’s Summary and taking photos), here is your opportunity to enable me to concentrate on producing a constant stream of informational, and sometimes (hopefully) funny, tweets live from a key meeting of interest to folks working in the world of Internet governance and Internet operations.

Blogging

I’ll be blogging to provide summaries of what’s happening at PP14 as well as to provide background to explain or speculate why negotiations are happening the way they are. As I did with WCIT, I’ll strive to post documents that show the differences between old versions of ITU’s Internet-related resolutions and the status of changes happening at PP14. I’ll also post some post-PP14 blogs analyzing what PP14’s outcomes may mean for future Internet governance discussions and the WSIS+10 UNGA event coming up in 2015. The blog posts will be published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence 4.0, enabling people or entities to publish parts or all of the articles, or tailor the articles for specific communities.

Podcasts

This is dependent on me figuring out how to use my brand new digital microphone and audio editing app during ICANN 51. My plan is to talk to PP14 participants to find out more about what people are thinking about Internet-related discussions at PP14. In particular, I am hoping to talk to those who aren’t the standard set of cheerleaders for multistakeholder Internet governance. The reason for this is the fact that I believe that if we’re ever to bridge the ideological and political divides that exist in the Internet governance sphere, we need to start listening to each other, and not just talk at each other.